A Study in Strawberries
by BINthere
Summary: Another L is reborn as Ulquiorra fix, rated T for no reason.


He wasn't sure, exactly, what had driven him to madness. To be so out of mind as to latch onto the nearest sugary thing.

He craved, more than before in this white, empty wasteland, to be granted a tiny speck of sugar. Just a speck to remind him of who he was before.

But death didn't work that way, he found, as he stared at his reflection, tracing teardrop tattoos. He isn't L anymore. He was another name, another face, another being.

He can't be one when he was another.

_Hollow_, they called him, with his panda eyes and wild black hair, fingers dabbed with sugar.

_Hollow, _they cried, the name of his race.

He was hollow into the afterlife, he realized, and almost let out a laugh before he caught himself.

If hollow he is, then Hollow he shall be.

#

He woke up in an empty wasteland, nothing but sand, white and more sand.

He looked down, and saw his claws, a stark white. The only colour in his entire being were his eyes, the brightest emerald green. He supposed that it made up for what little life his panda eyes had held in the life before that.

Looking around he realised he was not alone. There were other beings like him, lurking around this emptiness. But they were not like him. Not quite.

They had dark armour and black teeth and ferocious eyes. He couldn't even see his own face properly, but he knew he was different. It wasn't a big surprise to him when they noticed too, and isolated him.

He worked his way up,_ gillian, adjuchas, vasto lorde_, until finally under the help of the_ Hogyoku, Arrancar._

Gaining the trust and appraisal of Aizen, he made his way to _Espada,_ placing forth, a position he was quite content with.

Being in the top three meant being the most targeted, and being in lower five meant being overlooked, denied from any important duties.

Fourth was good, he decided, as close as the top as he wished for.

A stragical place indeed.

#

Sosuke Aizen was not someone to be messed with, he observed.

Too much like Yagami Light for his own good.

Sipping his tea, he closed his eyes, mind racing over how ironic everything was. He bet they would have a field day if they ever met, talking about justice and Gods, but then have any good feels and things as close to excitement they can have quickly dissolved as they tried to beat each other in a game of chess.

Then after a stalemate where neither could gain the upper hand, they would leave, exchange goodbyes, and decide whether they considered the other dangerous enough to kill.

Plot ways to do so just in case. And a backup plan, if things didn't go quite as smoothly.

Anyone with common sense would know not to put two God-complex, over-accomplished geniuses together.

This was something the world could live without.

Unfortunately, common sense was quite uncommon, and people like him (and Aizen, and Light) would just have to be forced into tolerating the unnecessary antics of those...not quite as gifted upstairs.

But really, though, maybe this was his punishment.

To be forced to work under someone very much like his nemesis, the cruel realization that there isn't much choice you have.

He finds this disturbing, and promptly decides to keep any wind of his second release nonexistent.

In his own way, he thinks, as he adds a cube of sugar in his tea, he is rebelling.

#

He can't keep this up forever.

Hold up this mask of who he has to be in order to survive. Being the loyal, unquestioning dog everyone thinks you are.

He is tired.

But he cannot rest. He wants more than anything to sink his teeth into pastries and sugary delights, even thinking of it makes him he feel his mouth water and his fingers twitch in their need to stack sugar cubes.

But he can't. Sugar was everything Ulquiorra was not. He is emptiness. He is _hollow_.

And he must live with this, as long as Aizen is still here, up there, watching his every move.

Aizen is a Shinigami wanting to be Hollow, exceeding Hollow, being the ultimate being.

Yagami Light is a human, exceeding shinigami, playing with death like the words sprouting from his silver tongue, turning situations to his advantage and people to his side.

They both hunger, crave the feeling only power can give them, both trying to play God, thinking that they can.

But maybe, he mused, playing God was too light a phrase to cage Light and Aizen.

Anytime you interfere with a natural process, you're playing God. In that sense, people play God more often then you think. You get sick, and you go to the doctor to stop that sickness...in a way, you_ are_ playing God.

And in another sense, that's understandable.

But you see, if you try to _be_ God, that is another thing entirely.

But the lack of sugar was making his head hurt, and he would rather think about things like that when his mind was properly...sugar-fied.

So for now, he would have to leave it at that.

#

He didn't know how long he had been in Hueco Mundo. Never bothered to count the days. All he knew was that he never seemed to age, face increasingly timeless the more he looked.

And he had looked more times than he was willing to admit.

He recognised his unkempt hair, tamer and longer and still the darkest black.

He recognised his pale, ghostly skin, more lacking in complexion than ever before.

He recognised, what people had once dubbed, 'panda eyes', big and wide and piercing, made catlike in his pupils, adding colour with its endless emerald green.

But every time he stared into his reflection, hoping to find some sense of familiarity, tired of the white sands, white walls _white white white-_

A stranger stared back.

He would stand there, not quite breathing, pupils dilated, until he found the stranger did the same.

Then he would reach his arm out, finding, searching, for what he didn't know.

Then his fingers touched the cold, smooth surface of the mirror and he left, feeling emptier than ever.

* * *

He was the odd one out, he found.

The Arrancar he had interacted with didn't have any memory of their past lives.

Curious, he brought up the subject once with Szayal, the one who seemed most informative of his own species.

He had then been stared down for almost five minutes before being given an answer.

"Well, you see, most of us don't have any memory of our past lives, assuming we haven't woke up somehow in this wasteland, or have a part of our soul ripped out to form a new being," Szayal paused, shooting him a curious look, "Say, by any chance do you have a strong sense of loneliness, or have an urge to hang out with Starrk-"

"No."

"No? Well okay then," he continued, never missing a beat, not even fazed by his sudden interruption, "Basically, we're human souls who lose their hearts due to despair or regret, and the heart that we lost transforms into our mask."

Then he scoffed, and waved a dismissive hand.

"But we're above that now."

Then Szayal shuddered at the thought, as if he had ever been less than perfect and _human _in the first place, "So don't worry about it."

But before he could politely point out that he had yet to answer his question, Szayal added, as second thought,

"But in some cases, if the hollow has something insanely important to them, such as goals to be fulfilled, or loved ones, they may retain some figment of memory from their past. But even so, it isn't much," he shrugged, "More so in the Espada, the most evolved of the Hollows. Most of us-"

It had then struck him, a a scary realization that they, the top ranking Espada, they too-

"-don't have any idea of who we were before."

* * *

He couldn't imagine losing himself.

Losing every single memory he had, every single person he had ever met, the crimes he solved, and to his utmost horror-

Forgetting the taste of strawberry cake.

More than a little traumatized by this train of thought, he decided to focus his brain on something else.

Like the burning question of _Why did he still have all his memories and why is it all so crystal clear it's like he never died?_

Maybe he carried his brains and smarts with him into the afterlife, and his memories were just part of the package?

Maybe his desire to capture Light was too much and ended up following him into the afterlife, along with every single interaction and case they solved?

But if that was so how did he still have memories of Watari and Wammy and Near and Mello and Matt and did he leave them enough chocolate because god knows Mello goes through them so fast and chocolate and sugar and confectionaries-

_Strawberry cake._

He needed a vacation.

* * *

**hello**, BINthere here.

**I had this thing lying around in my drafts for some time now, so i decided to post it as i set my mind to update my fanfics.  
This was something I wrote up in my Death Note phase, which i am technically still in...**

**This is going to be short, maybe a two-shot, so...yeah.**

**Don't forget to review, and if there's any constructive criticism, please feel free to say!**


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